Breakout on Iron Island
by Besprizornye
Summary: Iron Island is an impenetrable fortress and the most notorious prison in all of Sinnoh, but a mercenary by the name of Faro Klad with a unique set of pokémon and skills is on a mission to free one of Iron Island's most notorious inmates. What will happen when this immovable object meets this unstoppable force?


A number of years after the rich veins of ore had run dry, Iron Island had been converted into Sinnoh's most notorious prison. Even the most hardened criminal dreaded being sent to the Iron Island Penitentiary where the discipline was strict, the inmates little better than animals, and escape impossible. It had required surprisingly little effort to convert the site to an open-air prison. The biggest change was the transformation of an aging battleship, the ISN _Veilstone_, that had run aground on the island decades ago into an imposing fortress and symbol of the prison administration's authority. Its restored sixteen-inch guns were permanently aimed at the island and trained on the approaches to the prison and the facility itself, but they had never been fired. In all of its years of operation, no one had ever been foolish enough to try and escape from Iron Island. The challenges of geography were simply too great.

That was why the guards on duty reacted sluggishly when there was a frantic knocking on the door to the bridge that served as the nerve center of Iron Island's custodians. "Go check it out, Yukio!" snapped the captain of the watch and the elder of the two men with nary a glance up from his magazine.

Half-heartedly, the younger guard went over and opened the heavy metal door outwards with a horrendous grinding sound as he turned its handwheel. The portal had only opened an inch when fingers appeared around the edges to help haul it open and reveal the knocker, Jiro, another guard roughly the same age as Yukio. Jiro's dull gray uniform was thoroughly soaked, though Yukio could not be sure whether it was with seawater or sweat. His eyes were frantic, darting to Yukio's and then behind himself, as he sputtered, "We're under, under attack!"

Yukio's superior was on his feet now and pushed his way to the door. "What's this?" he bellowed. "What's the meaning of this? Out with it, you worm!"

Fear and over-exertion reduced the Jiro's breathing to painful wheezing, but he managed to speak in a ragged voice before his interrogator struck him for insubordination, "An attacker, came in with the supply ship, must've stowed away. Landed, on the beach. Heavy, fighting."

"Eh, just one man?" growled the captain and he seized Jiro roughly by the collar and pulled him off of his feet. "You're telling me that we're being attacked by one man?" And then he shook the limp Jiro, and bellowed, "And you lot can't handle it?"

A vein was pulsating dangerously on the captain's forehead, but before he could make an example out of Jiro, there was a sound outside of something heavy hitting the deck of the _Veilstone_. The captain dropped his man to the floor and let him shiver there as he started towards the railing. "Grab our pokémon!" he barked over his shoulder at Yukio, who snapped off a quick salute and then carried out this order.

He swept the poké balls into his hand. One, his, was red and white and the other was blue and white and belonged to the captain. What Yukio saw when he emerged out into the salt-tinged air stunned the young man into forgetting his errand momentary. On the deck of the battleship was a figure dressed from head to toe in heavy blue body armor so dark that it was almost black, and his face was hidden behind a helmet that looked less like military gear but rather more reminiscent of a Kalosian knight. Despite the weight of his armor, the intruder was moving quickly and confident down the surface of the deck towards the bridge, ignoring the shouts and fire from small arms of the dozen or so prison guards who had gathered.

"How did he get up here?" Yukio wondered aloud.

The captain grunted and replied, "Who cares? He's leaving in a body bag!" He reached for his service pistol in its holster, but as soon as the weapon came free, it was wrenched from his grip and flew through the air towards the armored figure.

The gun was caught by a metallic blue arm that emerged from over the intruder's shoulder and then crushed the weapon to scrap effortlessly in its clawed grip. The figure continued to advance.

Jiro was starting to stir, so Yukio handed off one of the pokémon to the captain and went to help the other man to his feet. He was trying to say something, but Jiro's words were drowned out by the booming voice of the captain, "Switch to pokémon!"

Acting as a single unit, the guards put away their firearms and produced a series of poké balls, and in a dazzling display of red light, the _Veilstone_'s deck was soon crawling with pokémon. They were a varied collection of sizes and species, but they were all powerful and well-trained. Led by the captain's own vicious-looking houndoom, the pokémon began their attack.

A luxio gave a loud battle cry and loosed a bolt of electricity at the armored human, but the man casually drew the attack into the center of his outstretched palm and made it vanish inside of his closed fist. Yukio was not given much time to wonder about what had become of the attack because in a flash and sizzle of burned fur, the eager young houndour that had attempted to bite the intruder's leg was blasted backwards by a surge of redirected electricity.

A barrel-chested machoke that was advancing steadily with its huge biceps curled up into a boxer's stance was suddenly buffeted by the sleek ruby form of a suddenly out of control scizor and the pair were sent sprawling out of the path of the invader. His progress was only stalled by the entry of the captain's houndoom into the fray. The snarling black canine leapt from the railing on the upper level towards its foe with claws outstretched and flames crackling in its throat. Four arms, two human and two that were brutal implements that looked like silverware if it had been designed by generals, that sprung from behind the armored figure's shoulders, all met in an attempt to ward off the Pokémon's fierce blasts of flame.

Behind Yukio, Jiro was conscious again, but still shivering in spite of the warm summer day. "Sound the alarm," he said gravely, "while there's still time."

The captain was lost in the battle below, giving out a mixture of commands, encouragement, and profanity to his fighting houndoom, but Yukio was listening to his comrade. "Why?" he asked.

"Don't you recognize him? That's Faro Klad!" gasped Jiro.

Yukio's mouth gaped open as well and he hazarded a look through the gaps in the ship's railing down to the raging battle on the deck below. Faro Klad was a globe-trotting criminal, a terrorist who ranked near the top of every international "most wanted" list even as his services were surreptitiously sought by governments on their behalf. He was known for his incredible ability to get the job done at any cost, and his fascinating method of doing so. Unlike most agents of chaos, Faro Klad shied away from the modern tools of bombs and guns in favor of a modus operandi that hearkened back to legends of the ancient world where a lone hero would go toe-to-toe with Pokémon himself rather than relying on his own proxies. Klad was a figure shrouded in innuendo and half-truth, but already Yukio believed the worst.

He scrambled past Jiro back into the command center and flipped up a glass box and slammed his palm down on the red button it had been blocking off to activate the prison's alarm system. The siren began its wailing klaxon call from the bridge of the ship and was soon joined by its brothers situated around Iron Island. Besides rallying the rest of the prison's guards to the defense of the _Veilstone_, Yukio also wanted to get a message out to the mainland. He fiddled with the ship's modified radio and tried to raise the garrison in Canalave. The soldiers were many miles away and would need to hurry if there was hope of putting a stop to whatever Faro Klad's plan was. But to Yukio's horror, no matter how much how he spun its dials, the radio was dead. The prison island, and everyone on it, was completely cut off from the outside world.

Yukio swallowed hard and looked at the poké ball that he had set down on the table when he had rushed into the cabin. There was only a moment of hesitation, but then his indoctrination asserted itself and he seized it and ran back outside to join the fray.

His participation did not stop Faro Klad's inexorable progress, but Yukio tried to content himself as his vision went black that he had at least helped slow him down.

* * *

After a leap from the bridge of the battleship, Faro Klad touched down with surprising gentleness on the sandy surface of Iron Island after he had cleared the _Veilstone_ of any opposition and decapitated the prison's command structure. The sirens were still emitting their plaintive screams, but without radio communication to inform them of the nature of the crisis, the overall effect on the remaining guards would be sure to be one of confusion on the remaining watchmen. Klad would use that to his full advantage to complete his mission.

He strode purposefully toward the gaping maw that served as the only entrance and exit to the body of the prison. No men ran out to meet him. The guards at that station had been the first to meet him when he first made landfall, and they were thus the first to fall. Faro Klad went inside.

It was dark inside of the main shaft of the mine. What little sunlight that trickled in from the entrance was assisted only half-heartedly by electric lamps on the walls that sputtered weakly. The feeble set-up, complete with fully exposed wires haphazardly running along the repurposed mine's walls, were ample demonstration of how little the Sinnohese government cared about its criminals. Further evidence of this neglect was demonstrated by the gaunt and hollow-eyed figures wandering inside of the darkness. They were emaciated with hunger and pale from long sentences spent in the darkness, but they did not approach Faro Klad too closely, even though it was clear that all of them wanted something from him. It could have been food, information, or even simple human companionship, but that was none of Klad's concern. He walked by the shambling prisoners as if they were not there at all, but that did not prevent some of them from flinching at his approach, like a pokémon that had been beaten by its master.

These walking phantoms were merely the initial welcoming committee, however. As the hunter strode further down into the scar cut in the earth there began to be more signs of life, although none of them were pretty. Overturned buckets of human waste, prone figures who may have been sleeping or dead, and arcane sigils scrawled crudely into the rock that denoted an area as the territory of one gang or another, these were the products of the men that had been locked away and had not faltered under the pressure but had instead grown tougher, more feral.

If it had not been for the telegraphed signs, and his own experience, Faro Klad might not have expected trouble, but as it was, when it came, he was well-prepared. A trio of muscular men leapt out of one of the side tunnels that Klad had already passed and tried to rush him, but they did not get far with their improvised weapons of bone and metal. The ever-watchful metang that Faro Klad carried on the back of his armor saw them coming and was ready to handle the ruffians by the time that their bellowing war cry hit Klad's ears. Their limbs were seized and crushed, their fury turned to horror, and they were sent scattering into the walls with a powerful display of telekinetic power.

And Faro Klad had not even had to turn around, nor slow his pace.

Time was of the essence with this mission, but it was still worth it, in his estimation, to tie up any loose ends. So Klad had turned around to face the dazed and broken men and began to utilize another one of his pokémon's abilities. The twin magneton that he housed inside of his armor arrayed around his shoulders not only reduced the weight of his metal armor to virtually nothing, but they also were well-trained in a style of nonverbal orders that Klad could convey to them through precise movements of his hands. Fingers played keys and wrists conducted to music that only the hunter and his pokémon could hear, and then the metal-infused walls of the tunnel began to shift and flow like molasses around Faro Klad's would-be assailants, trapping their broken and bruised bodies in manacles of stone.

Satisfied with his work, he ventured further underground. After the very brief scuffle, Klad's progress was unmolested, but the silent stares that he felt emanating from behind every dark corner were now full of loathing and hatred in addition to the fear that he had felt in the looks he had been subjected to closer to the surface. It was of no consequence, as long as the prisoners still were afraid of him. Fear was a valuable commodity in almost any amount in his line of work, all of it exclusively on the other side of the ledger.

The line of tracks for long-vanished mine carts that Klad had been following came to an abrupt end at the edge of a wide pit that dropped straight done in devouring blackness. The armored man considered this development wordlessly, and then held up his left palm and, with a simple tap of his thumb against the side of his gauntleted fingers, it was illuminated with a faint yellow glow provided by the Magneton housed on that side of his suit. Even though the output was purposefully low to avoid any damage to the armor or its inhabitant, in the underground of Iron Island, the light stuck out like a sore thumb and threw shadows all over the underground cavern. Despite their misgivings, the inmates brave enough to come this close to the mouth of the abyss were emerging from where they had holed up to see the light, drawn to it like venomoth to a flame.

From where he was standing, Faro Klad saw that there was a narrow path that descended around the circumference of the black hole. He took the first step along that road and it was clear that he would not be followed or hindered in any way. His silent audience was not willing to endure the blackness for a small taste of the light. Whatever trail he would now tread, as he had always done, Klad would walk it alone.

Holding his illuminated hand up to the wall as he walked, the hunter could make sure that his footsteps would fall on solid ground. He also saw that there were markings on these walls again, but they lacked the telltale signs of human intelligence behind the crude graffiti he had encountered before. These were violent tears in the thick rock, scratches made by something of incredible strength. Unless someone had somehow managed to balance an earthmover on this slim excuse of a plane, it had to have been made by a pokémon. But there had been no pokémon inside the cave thus far, at least not that he could see. But Klad simply filed away the information and kept walking. It was not pertinent to his mission.

By his estimation, he was well over a mile beneath sea level, but there was still no sign of the pit he circled ending. That was fine. His prize did not lay in Hell itself, or at least that was what he had been led to believe.

Faro Klad's did arrive at his destination shortly thereafter and the occasion was marked by a low sound of plaintive wailing. As he turned to look at a passage cut into the side of the hole, the light that shone from his hand revealed a long, unlit tunnel lined with barred cells that reflected his illumination on ancient-looking bars of metal. It had been eerily quiet in the mine since his attackers were driven back, but now the pendulum swung in the other direction and Klad was presently bombarded with a litany of moans and words that coursed together into a mass of noise.

"Please, you have to help me…"

"Do you like money…?"

"Don't leave me in here…"

They grew more strident as Klad strode past them impassively, scanning the inhabitants in search of his target.

"You can't do this!"

"Let me out!"

"I can't stand it!"

"It'll come back!"

Near the end of the row of cages, there was one man who was not shouting out. He was huddled in a corner, reducing his already limited height, and muttering quietly to himself. His hair had gone grayer since his time as a free man, the glasses he wore were missing a lens and crudely mended together, and his trademark lab coat had been replaced with a soiled jumpsuit, but he was undoubtedly the target. The man continued to rock back and forth, but once the hunter was outside of his cell, he stole glances up at Faro Klad and ceased the charade entirely when Klad produced another pokémon, a honedge, out from the sheath on his waist and began sawing at the bars of the cell with it.

"Who are you?" the man said in an accusing voice as he staggered to his feet. When Faro Klad did not respond, he asked, "Do you know who I am?" and, although it looked as though he wanted to say more, the prisoner finally just said, "If this is a breakout, please do hurry."

Before he could finish the thought, Faro Klad's bladed pokémon sawed through the first bar around the cell's lock and the prisoner decided that it was smarter to keep quiet while his rescuer worked. In a blessedly short while the deed was done, the honedge stowed away, and the rusty door swung out to let the dumpy little man out into the tunnel.

"Very good work, I must commend you," he said with an air of dignity that did not befit his appearance or situation. "Now, let us depart from this miserable place. The guards are brutal, just monstrous. And there is also some-" He stopped himself before he could say too much. "I assume that you, of course, have a plan to get us off this wretched island? Ah, but of course, it stands to reason that if you are here, you had a means to get onto the island, and therefore also an egress."

Faro Klad let the shorter man talk, it seemed to do a better job of keeping him calm and moving forward than anything the hunter could do. Their progress came to a halt after the pair had exited the side passage and gone no more than forty feet back up the spiraling embankment. There they found the path out of the pit blocked by a gargantuan obstacle that was half-buried in the side of the pit and stretched across the entirety of the narrow path to drape obscenely over the edge. It took a few minutes, but Klad deduced that the obstacle that cut off their escape was a dead steelix, one with horrible gashes rent deep in its supposedly-impervious armored head.

"What do we do now?" asked his charge in a higher, unsteady voice. "Can we get around it? Can you move it?"

Wordlessly, Faro Klad was seeking the answers to those questions for himself by examining the downed Pokémon and how it was positioned. From what he could see, the steelix was twisted at an unnatural angle that suggested that it had been hurled into the path, but what would be powerful enough to accomplish such a feat? In any case, the serpentine pokémon's body was dug firmly in the rock surface of the pit and the wall. Attempting to remove the steelix could cause the whole path to the surface to collapse, and disturbing it by trying to climb on top of it could have the same effect.

As he contemplated this obstacle, the man Faro Klad had freed was growing more and more nervous. "Please hurry," he said. "If we cannot go up… well, we certainly cannot go down. Better to go back in the cells then to-" He stopped as his panic took a backseat to curiosity. "Who sent you? Why did you come here and break me out of my cage? I am a man of some importance, you-"

"Mine is not to reason why," interrupted Faro Klad in a voice that echoed hollowly from inside of his helmet, "mine is to do and die." Then he seized the other man by the filthy hand and leapt into the pit.

The terrified prisoner's scream pierced the stagnant air of the abandoned mine, and his panic was heightened by the sudden darkness that came from the loss of light from Klad's hand.

Ignoring the racket, Klad was giving orders to his pokémon, "Rapidly cycle between polarities. Take us up." With diligence that served as a testament to their training and ability, Faro Klad's embedded magneton dedicated all of their power and attention to manipulating the magnetic fields that they could generate to alternately repel their master's armored chassis from the iron-infused wall of the pit below them and pull them towards the space above them. Taken as a series of individual steps, the process was akin to climbing a staircase by jumping up one stair at a time, but the duo of magneton were so adept in their work that it appeared to Faro Klad and his unwitting passenger that they were soaring up out of the pit, using the hole as a make-shift elevator shaft.

Klad had looked down once to make sure that he still had a firm hold on the other man, and saw a set of glowing red eyes, he wasn't sure how many, appearing to track their progress. While he knew that they must have merely been the result of some abandoned equipment, the sensation of being watched by something alien and unknowable still made him uneasy. He would not shed any tears when this job was over.

The two men flew out of the abyss to land on the more solid ground of the main floor of the mine. Klad signaled for the light to return to his left hand and looked coldly down at the man he had been hired to retrieve. The freed prisoner was holding onto his arm and still blubbering even though the worst part of the journey had already passed. There were a rough-looking crowd of prisoners gathering around them now to examine the men who had gone into the darkness and come back out again, so Klad roughly dragged his charge to his feet and pushed forward into the sea of reprobates and sinners. He signaled through his free hand for his twin magneton to be ready to electrocute any would-be assailant, but no such attack came. Instead, the throng of prisoners parted silently in reverence of this outsider who had conquered their worst fear, and the pair passed without incident.

The path grew easier after that, and Klad's companion grew more in control of himself. Soon he was driving forward under his own power and talking freely, although he was very careful about staying at his protector's side. "There's so much to catch up on," the short man said with an undercurrent of giddiness. "So many new developments, new situations to analyze and plan for." He looked at Faro Klad's masked form skeptically. "I don't suppose that you could give me an overview, an outline, a summary?"

The hunter said nothing, but kept steadily moving towards the light of the mine's entrance.

"Come now! I know that you can talk; that bit of poetry you produced when we were in the dark is all the proof that I need. So why keep mum? Let me know who you are working for. I'm sure there are many individuals and organizations that desire my genius as an invaluable aid to their ambitions, and I have no complaints, as long as the price is right!"

"Don't know," answered Klad simply. "Don't care."

The other man turned to study Klad as they continued walking. "Ah, we appear to be of a similar mercenary mindset! But you are no common thug, as your talent at enacting this operation makes so very clear. So! I know that you would not be satisfied with working for anyone without doing a bit of background research. It is, after all, no less than I myself would do."

Klad pushed himself a little harder than he would have otherwise and was rewarded by a vision of the clear blue sky outside of the mine shaft. He enjoyed the brief respite of silence that ensued as the prisoner shed that label and stood blinking in the beauty of natural sunlight.

"How long it has been," the bespectacled man said softly. In the sunlight, his pale visage and hollowed facial features were much more noticeable. Then the man's attention alighted on the forbidding sentinel of the ISN _Veilstone_, with all of its sixteen-inch batteries still pointed at the entrance into the prison proper. "I, ah, trust that you have taken care of that?" he asked. "It would be quite the turn to find my newfound freedom ended in such a quick and violent fashion."

Faro Klad did not answer him directly. Instead, he just began walking steadily towards the battleship. When the hunter was not blown apart by cannon fire, the other man hurriedly followed after him. He was stopped and sent sprawling on the ground with an unapologetic shove from Klad as one of the guns on the ship's deck swung with jerky, halting movements to bring them within its sights. Behind his faceplate, Klad's eyes narrowed. There was a loose end. Not good.

On the _Veilstone_, Yukio was seated at one of the monumental deck guns and gritting his teeth and blinking the blood out of his eyes as he brought the heavy weapon to bear on his enemy, the terrorist Faro Klad. There was a gash on his head and his vision was fuzzy, sometime even splitting into double vision, but the guard was stalwart. He would do his duty to the death. He was about to fire his battery when he felt it begin to move without his input. In a flash he considered and discounted the likelihood that it was gravity or some kind of hallucination brought on by his injuries. Instead, he looked around the gunsight and saw the man he had been aiming his weapon at standing defiantly on the beach in a wide stance with his arms outstretched towards the battleship. To Yukio's dawning horror, he saw that it his weapon was not the only one that was being reoriented. The deck guns on either side of his were turning to face Yukio's even as his was standing down.

He gulped once and began a half-finished prayer in his head before Yukio's world was no more in a roar of fire and lead.

The sound of the explosion was deafeningly loud at such close proximity, but Klad could still make out the combination of triumph and confusion in his charge's voice when he shouted over the din, "Wonderful! But now how are we supposed to get off of the island when you have destroyed a boat? Hmm? It does us no good to strand us on this island! It defeats the whole purpose of your mission: namely, rescuing me!"

Klad's head was pounding and he staggered first to one knee and then to both of them. The exertion of redirecting a trio of sixteen-inch guns had required every ounce of power his magneton had possessed, and then some. The two pokémon had needed to siphon off some of his own electrical energy to achieve such a feat, and now both of his arms were tingling with numbness. He could only hope that the nerve damage was not permanent. With an intense effort, he raised one arm and pointed it at the marred _Veilstone_. "On the other side," grunted Klad, "there's another boat. Supply ship… We have to get to it…"

The little man looked pityingly at Klad. "Why should it be 'we'? However interesting whatever designs your employers have for my genius may be, they, and by extension you, do not offer me true freedom, simply another form of prison. I am the man code-named 'Charon', the intellectual dynamo behind the Galactic organization. Give me one good reason why I should not make an escape of my own on the vessel which you were so kind to procure."

Faro Klad's voice rasped from inside of the helmet, but the single word was all that he needed. "Rotom."

"What did you say?" hissed Charon. Then, the older man said more loudly, "Do you know where he is?"

The hunter stood back up to his full height and towered over the bespectacled man. With stiff movements, he lumbered over and roughly grabbed Charon's shoulders and squeezed, hard. Pain shot through to Klad's brain and his vision blurred, but he said through gritted teeth, "If you don't come with me you will never know."

Although he squirmed, there was no real conviction behind his struggle, and Charon dropped his eyes to the ground. "Very well, then," he huffed. "Take me to the one holding your leash." Klad clout him once in the side of the head for his rudeness, but it was not a serious blow and the two of them set off toward the water's edge with renewed purpose.

They walked through the potter's field of guards and their pokémon and then around the hull of the _Veilstone_. When Faro Klad and Charon had emerged from out from under the shadow of the beached vessel, they saw another boat, this one securely anchored at the island's single dock. It was much smaller and lacked any weaponry and carried the Sinnohese flag. It took the shorter man a few seconds to understand what it was he was seeing, but when the realization came he blurted out, "The supply ship! So you stowed away on it? Very impressive! How did you handle the crew?"

Faro Klad said nothing, but gestured with one hand backwards at the bodies lying cold on the beach. Charon seemed to get the message and became singularly focused on reaching the small ship. There was a gangplank hanging over the side, but a weak flick of Klad's wrist signaled for his magneton to release it and it landed with a muffled sound in the sand. The two men then boarded the boat and pulled up the ramp after them.

"The Sinnohese navy is incredibly regimented," observed Charon. "These supply ships never travel with much more fuel than is absolutely necessary, which means that we'll have to return to its port of origin, Canalave, and likely have to contend with the soldiers stationed there." He gave Klad a curious look. "Even if you were willing to take such a chance, since this ship hasn't reported in they will be scouring the seas for it, and we lack the fuel or hardware for any serious attempt at maneuvering those patrols. So, my armored deliverer, what is your plan?"

"We go north," Klad said as he removed his helmet with trembling fingers. His tanned face was flat, expressionless, and eminently unremarkable. It was possible to forget that he was one of the most wanted men in the world. "My pokémon will help and push this bucket harder and faster than it could go under its own power. They're waiting for us in Snowpoint. We'll make land there." He walked to the ship's bridge to raise the vessel's anchor, and as he did so, his pokémon separated themselves from his armor in a well-practiced operation, leaving the hunter somewhat diminished, but not by much. Two magneton, a metang, and a honedge floated obediently on the deck, awaiting their instructions, which were quick in coming. The pair of three-eyed magneton followed their master to areas he designated on either side of the supply ship's deck, while the blue-hued metang and the keenly sharp honedge began searching the boat for any unwelcome surprises.

Before long the two pokémon returned from their patrol and reported back to their master on the ship's deck. With wordless gestures of its long arms, the metang conveyed that it had nothing to report, but Klad's honedge interjected, with swift slashing movements of its long body, what it had found to its trainer.

When it had finished, Faro Klad nodded once, and the metang and honedge resumed their respective places on their master's armored body. The reunited amalgamation began walking to the rear of the ship. Charon scrambled after Klad as best as his pudgy body could manage. "What is it?" he wheezed.

"We have company on this ship. I will go deal with him." Klad pointed quickly at his twin magneton who had taken up their assigned positions. At this signal, each of the pokémon's tripartite bodies began to crackle with electricity, with sparks leaping between a dozen sets of magnets in vivid showers of blue, red, and yellow. Charon watched the tremendous display of power with awe and naked greed in his sunken eyes and when he turned back around, Faro Klad was gone, vanished into the heart of the supply ship.

Internally, the hunter was glad that he had the opportunity to give his magneton more time to build up power. Parts of his body were still numb from their siphoning off of his life force to destroy the _Veilstone_. Hopefully, given the opportunity to charge up ahead of time, the two pokémon would be able to bring them to Snowpoint without having to leech off of their master's life force any more than they already had. The risk was too great.

Following the directions that his honedge had given him, Faro Klad delved carefully down stairways and a cramped hallway into the belly of the small supply ship. There, behind a half-opened door, was a small and frightened man in a low-ranking naval uniform who was huddled up against the wall on the far side of the room. His eyes were wide and frightened and he cradled a small orange weapon in his hands.

He pointed it at Faro Klad as the hunter stepped out of the shadows and into the dim light given off by the single light bulb flickering above. "Go away! Go away!" the man screamed hoarsely at Klad and waved his weapon around wildly. "I'll shoot! I'll shoot you dead!"

Behind his mask, Klad's eyes flickered down to the crazed man's hands. He was not holding a real weapon, but a mere flare gun. "I'm taking this ship," Klad said simply. "You cannot be on it." The hunter took a step forward.

"Stay back!" the man screamed and his grip on the flare gun became shakier, its barrel bobbing around even more wildly. Klad took another step and the movement became even more erratic. "Stay back!"

Another step and the man fired the gun and sent a brightly colored flare at Faro Klad's head. The hunter did not flinch. He trusted his pokémon too much to show that kind of weakness and lack of faith. Sure enough, one of his metang's heavy arms swung quickly down in front of him and caught the burning flare right in its clawed hands and crushed it into a sputtering nothingness.

The frantic man reached into his pocket, very likely for another weapon or for additional flares for the one he had out right now. Faro Klad never found out what the man was trying to get at - his honedge was much too quick.

Klad returned to the deck and the open air it promised, already putting the grisly scene out of his mind. Charon and Klad's magneton were waiting for him there, with the dumpy little man observing his arrival as clinically as he had been studying the two pokémon. Their bodies were now spinning at a dizzying pace and glowing from the heat they were generating in pursuit of greater and greater amounts of power.

"Ah, so you've returned," the disgraced scientist said casually. He quickly resumed watching the magneton. "Fascinating Pokémon you have here. Such potential. Why with the right brain behind your capabilities, it would be possible for you to accomplish great things. Yes, great things indeed."

"They should be ready," said Klad. "Stand back."

Charon looked as though he was going to raise a protest for the sake of his curiosity, but his sense of self-preservation, as it so often had, won out and he retreated a safe distance from the charged-up pokémon. Klad put out his hands with the palms of his gloved hands facing upward and slowly began to raise them. With a groan of metal, the ship underneath them shifted under them. Klad then directed his hands and his pokémon away from the shoreline and slowly, carefully, the magneton, and thus the ship, followed his orders. Once the supply ship had made a fair amount of progress towards the sparkling blue water of the West Sinnoh Sea, Klad thrust his arms forward and relaxed as his pokémon began driving the ship forward with as much speed as they could manage.

Even then the boat was not moving very quickly, and so the hunter said to Charon, "I am going to start up the engines."

"You still believe that the fuel this ship carries will be of sufficient quantity to deliver us to Snowpoint?"

Klad's only answer was to say stiffly, "Watch the pokémon." Then he walked back to the bridge.

The engines of the small ship started up quickly enough since Faro Klad had been careful to try and damage the ship as little as possible when he had commandeered it during his journey to Iron Island. Even though it was only scant hours earlier, it felt farther away in time. That was the nature of Klad's work though: long periods of preparation and waiting punctuated by intense bursts of action, often violent in nature.

Faro Klad's reflections were interrupted when he was joined in the command hub of the paltry vessel by his charge, the man who went by Charon. The imprisoned scientist had regained some of his haughty air and health as a result of his expanded freedom and exposure to the sun, but he still looked troubled behind his pair of oft-repaired glasses. "I know that you asked for me to keep tabs on your pokémon, but they appear to have the matter of augmenting this ship's locomotion well in hand. Fascinating creatures to begin with, and to have them so well-trained…" Charon's voice trailed off, but his gaze never left Klad's masked face, trying to see if his compliment would open the armored man up to him at all. When he saw that this tactic had failed, Charon sighed heavily and shifted tracks, saying, "I know that you are being paid very handsomely to bring me to your employer or employers, whosoever they may well be, and that a criteria of your work is that you refrain from divulging information to me about any aspect of my new situation." He paused and took another deep breath. Klad had gone back to looking over the controls to the wide-open sea before them and was making minute course corrections. "I know that your lips are sealed with regard to those details, but I do have one request that I shall make. Please, tell me what you know of Rotom." Klad said nothing and Charon continued, his voice coming faster, at the edge of his control, "How did you know about him? Has he been sighted? Is he alright?"

For a long while, nothing passed between the two men, the one imposing and dangerous-looking and the other shrunken and pathetic. Finally, still without giving Charon the dignity of looking at him, Faro Klad flatly stated, "I don't know anything about your pokémon, not beyond its name. That was all that I was told."

Charon sunk against the bulkhead and looked miserable. The bright early afternoon sun shone down on the lone boat and the waves slapped against the ship, and, almost imperceptibly, the fourth and fifth fingers on Faro Klad's left hand twitched against the steering mechanism.

Mission accomplished.


End file.
